by GILLES GUIRAND — 6 weeks ago in CONTRIBUTORS Credit: Parse At the conclusion of January, Facebook had officially shuttered Parse, disabling the API on an app by app basis. As a Backend as a Service (BaaS) product, the development platform provided SDKs and APIs that allowed developers to quickly build their apps without having to build a backend from scratch. Facebook did’t present much insight into the motivation to shut down the platform. But Parse’s customers, following the 2013 acquisition, comprised heavily of small to medium sized developers that had aRead More

Monks take on the trolley problem, a classic moral dilemma that has big implications for driverless cars. A Buddhist monk with a robot monk developed by a temple BeijingKim Kyung Hoon / Reuters The Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene is an expert in “trolleyology,” the self-effacing way he describes his research into the manifold variations on the “trolley problem.” The basic form of this problem is simple: There’s a trolley barreling towards five people, who will die if they’re hit. But you could switch the trolley onto another track on which onlyRead More